Do you feel constrained by your current system? I could imagine you might be hitting memory limits and paging to disk at times, particularly when video editing and possibly photoshop. If that's the case, and given where memory prices are -- and the ongoing commercial life of DDR3 -- you're better off investing in that than trying to stuff more DDR2 into your current rig, even if it entails buying a mobo as well. On the other hand, an SSD might give a bigger boost to your system overall. But the real question is whether you need to spend any money at all.

Another option: Keep the DDR2 from your old rig and just get a 775 board that supports it. I'm running a 775 board with DDR2-1066 right now and it does pretty well for itself. The trick with DDR3 + a Core 2 is that you are still stuck with the stupid Front Side Bus to communicate with memory & all the peripherals. That effectively means that the FSB, and not your RAM, is the bottleneck.

You can save some money (admittedly not a lot with current DDR3 prices) by just reusing your existing RAM and getting a decent second-hand 775 board that uses DDR2. I have an X38 chipset DDR2 board from Asus (I think it's a Rampage, I got it in 2008 so details are dim). Is it a step up from a socket-939 Athlon? Hells yes. It's by no means a modern badass system, but you should be able to get by for a while until you are ready for a bigger upgrade.

Last edited by chuckula on Sun Feb 26, 2012 1:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

UberGerbil wrote:Do you feel constrained by your current system? I could imagine you might be hitting memory limits and paging to disk at times, particularly when video editing and possibly photoshop. If that's the case, and given where memory prices are -- and the ongoing commercial life of DDR3 -- you're better off investing in that than trying to stuff more DDR2 into your current rig, even if it entails buying a mobo as well. On the other hand, an SSD might give a bigger boost to your system overall. But the real question is whether you need to spend any money at all.

I really do feel constrained by this system. Photoshop is slow when I have multiple large images open. Encoding video takes forever. Worst of all is when working with large RAR and PAR2 archives the system will absolutely drop to its knees.